michael – Page 35

Commuting by bike

In Greener Homes on June 11, 2011

Why cycling will get you fit and green

BRUNSWICK resident Rosy Strong rides her bike to work in Richmond. “It means I don’t have to think too much about exercise or going to the gym out of hours,” she says. “My ride to work becomes my hour of daily activity.”

Around the offices of Bicycle Victoria, says Bart Sbeghen, they call this “the extra Tim Tam factor”.

“A lot of people ride for convenience and then they realise they’ve got the health benefit. An extra Tim Tam a day – it’s all justified,” he says.

Mr Sbeghen says there’s been a steady rise in commuter cycling numbers around Australia. “Riding to work just keeps going up and up, especially in the capital cities. Melbourne’s inner-north has almost one in five people riding to work. And the number of cyclists on Swanston Street lately is equivalent to more than 40 trams a day. It’s getting to be like a European city.”

If climate change is a diabolical policy problem, then cycling is one of the saintly solutions. Pedal pushing is an antidote for several modern ills, from greenhouse gas emissions, air and noise pollution, and traffic congestion, to obesity and social isolation.

“It’s a big cost saving too,” Mr Sbeghen says. “In some cases, people can give up the second car, or their monthly public transport ticket.”

But while inner-city residents can cruise on easy streets – especially in Melbourne’s north, which has a web of bike lanes – the roads are rougher for cyclists elsewhere.

Mr Sbeghen is working on design guidelines for new housing estates to make sure developers consider the needs of bike riders, such as direct links to shops, schools and public transport. With smarter planning, he says, cycling can fit in with local errands or make up one leg of a longer commute for people in middle- and outer-ring suburbs.

“Not all jobs are in the city, and shops and schools are always local,” he says. “Trips of between two and five kilometres are in the sweet spot where riding beats any other way of getting about.”

To find out about cycling in your area, contact your local Bicycle Users Group. On its website, Bicycle Victoria has a long list of BUGs and cycling clubs. “They’re popping up everywhere,” Mr Sbeghen says. “BUGs are independent and they talk to local politicians about what they want. It’s making for a much healthier city.”

If you’re hesitant about getting into the saddle, consider cycle safety training. Ms Strong’s business, Bikes@Work, runs regular courses for the Darebin, Booroondara and Whitehorse councils, as well as for individuals.

She says the idea of riding in traffic can be intimidating. “One rider said to me, ‘In a car, you’ve got metal wrapped around your skin, but on a bicycle, it’s skin wrapped around metal.’ People feel there’s a lack of protection.”

But that sense of vulnerability can become a strength, if you ride with it in mind. Ms Strong advises bike riders to use lots of lights and reflectors. “And you need to be looking around you all the time, observing and anticipating what could happen,” she says.

“Position yourself in a predictable, visible place on the road. Keep a metre out from the kerb or from parked cars – never assume drivers will watch for cyclists before they open their door.”

Read this article at The Age online

Revolutionary compost bays

In Blog on June 10, 2011

THE Urban Bush-Carpenters returned to Stewart Lodge, hitherto the site of our finest hour, the walk-in chook house. And we topped it.

Over the course of four weekends, we constructed a hybrid compost bay/deep litter chook-feeding system. In the absence of naysayers, we consider it to be a world’s first.

As seen on TV, Stewart Lodge is a residential care facility for people with acquired brain injury. The garden co-ordinators, Robin and Nattie, had strict design requirements for us to meet. They wanted the Lodge chickens to have access to the bays – that way, the chooks could scratch around and feed on the kitchen scraps, all the while adding their own nitrogen-rich deposits to the mix. But the design would have to be as simple as possible, so the residents could use it. No heavy lids or complex mechanisms.

Unfortunately, these demands postponed Geoff’s longstanding desire to construct a chook-powered conveyor-belt and elevator contraption:

This sketch was better:

After a frank planning pow-wow, we settled on the perfect design. We would build the bays with tall posts and doors that hinged at the top. To give the ladies access to the veggie scraps, we’d extend the run all the way to the bays, and wrap the frame in chicken wire to prevent their escape.

We’d been collecting materials hither and thither for a couple of months. My mother’s friend Pretam is renovating her home around the corner from Stewart Lodge, and we were able to construct the bays almost entirely from material she kindly donated – her old hardwood framing timber, floorboards and even a classy wire door. Late one night we scavenged sheets of tin from a footpath in Carlton North, and motored nonchalantly down a main road with several sheets protruding savagely from the rear end of a hatchback.

And so, to the construction: together with volunteers and prodigal bush-carpenter Dale, we worked on the beast. We’d confidently predicted we’d have it done in two afternoons. It took four weekends instead, including one dawn to dusk session by Geoff and Andy under a giant tarp, while the Gods wept bitter tears.

But here is the magnificent finished product, which makes everything (almost) worthwhile (maybe).

The final afternoon, as we basked in our own self-satisfied glory, one resident approached with food scraps to feed the chickens. “Put it in the compost bays!” I suggested, and tried to explain our grand plan.

She was unconvinced. “How are the chickens going to get in there?” she said scornfully – and perceptively. She may have a point.

Greener apartment blocks

In Architecture and building, Environment on June 4, 2011

YOU’D think apartments would have smaller eco-footprints than houses – after all, they’re usually smaller and stacked up, not sprawling. But are high-rise inhabitants really justified in looking down upon energy-guzzling suburbanites?

In 2005 Paul Myors, from EnergyAustralia, investigated the carbon emissions of different kinds of housing for the NSW Department of Planning (PDF). Surprisingly, he found that apartment-dwellers account for more greenhouse gas emissions than residents in detached housing (not including transportation).

Myors laid the blame at the energy consumption of common areas, together with lower occupancy rates in apartments.

Michael Buxton, professor of environment and planning at RMIT, confirms that high-rise residential buildings – above about nine storeys – tend to be very poor performers. “That’s partly because they often use a lot of glass in construction,” he says. “But they also have lifts, big foyers and lots of large spaces that have to be heated, as well as other facilities like gyms and pools.”

“The best energy performance comes from attached buildings such as townhouses and villas – your classic medium density,” Buxton says. According to Myors’ research, a typical townhouse produces about half the carbon emissions of a high-rise apartment.

So what can eco-minded apartment dwellers do to lift their game?

This article explores the ways you can go green in common. I’ll bypass the standard steps individuals can take within their own walls, and focus on the measures that transform the building as a whole.

Owners corporations

If retrofitting your own home looks confusing, the added challenge of common property can be mind-boggling. “With collective decision-making and volunteer committees, there’s a whole layer of complexity that gets in the way of change,” says Christine Byrne, founder of eco-website Green Strata.

As a first step, she suggests green-minded strata-title owners join the management committee of their building. “If you’re on the committee, it’s easier to get access to information and put items on agendas,” she says. (The task is harder for renters; unfortunately, you’ll have to convince owners to take up the case for you.)

Once you’re there, Byrne suggests getting a picture of exactly what you’re all consuming. The best way to do that is by commissioning an environmental audit of the building. At the least, make sure you’re actually seeing your bills, not just paying them automatically.

“Start to make a list of what’s happening in your building and work through the options,” she says. “The bigger your building, the more you can do, because the greater your water and energy consumption. With smaller buildings the options might be things like double-glazing, waste and composting.”

Lighting

As in any existing home or office, improving lighting efficiency is the easiest step – and some changes will cost nothing at all.

In a case study detailed on Green Strata, Nexus apartments in St Leonards, Sydney, found the fluorescent globes in its car park were illuminating the space well beyond what was necessary. So the building manager simply removed almost half the tubes.

“Walk around your building and look at every light,” suggests Byrne. “Can outdoor lights be solar lights? Consider timers, motion sensors and LEDs – for every space there’s a different solution. De-lamping is an easy step, but you have to make sure the level of lighting still complies with Australian Standards.”

Nexus also installed day/night detectors for the compact fluorescent globes under its awnings, as well as motion sensors in the plant and utility rooms. Both measures meant that the lights no longer ran 24-hours a day. The cost is expected to be recouped in savings within 12 months.

Water

In buildings taller than three storeys, water consumption packs a double-whammy. Each drop has an associated energy cost for pumping (as well as the energy cost for heating it). And if that’s not concern enough, in most apartments, residents don’t have separate water meters.

“People aren’t paying for water based on their own consumption,” says Byrne. “The water use of some of these big buildings is quite horrific and it can be very poor in the older ones as well.”

While this is a problem, it’s also an opportunity for serious savings. Miramar Apartments, a 38-storey building in the Sydney CBD, undertook an audit by Sydney Water. The assessment identified major leaks and found that most tap fittings and showerheads were inefficient. Each apartment was retrofitted by the utility under its WaterFix program (which costs as little as $22 per dwelling).

For measures that totalled about $7000, the building cut its water use by one-fifth. It saves about $64,000 each year on water and energy bills combined.

“We’re starting to see owners corporations agreeing to pay for the WaterFix,” Byrne says. “You have to do annual fire inspections, so at the same time, why not do an annual water inspection?”

Hot water

If you have to wait a long time for hot water, it’s likely there’s something amiss in the pipes. Many large buildings have centralised hot water that uses a ring main system – a pipe that loops from the boiler, past all levels and back again.

In this kind of system, broken valves, cross-connections and lack of insulation on pipes can cause a lot waste.

The Sustainable Living in the City trial, run by the Melbourne City Council in 2008, found that some residents in high-rise apartment buildings were waiting up to ten minutes for their hot water to flow.

Dorothy LeClaire oversees the owners corporation department at from Melbourne in the City Management, which manages three of the buildings that took part in the trial. One of the key recommendations was that plumbers assess the ring main system. And for some residents there was an instant benefit: immediate hot water.

“When you do ring main balancing, the hot water comes a lot quicker,” she says. “It saves water, obviously – there’s less cold water going down the drain. But it also saves energy because you have to heat less water.

Waste

When Melbourne City Councillor Cathy Oke moved into her CBD apartment, she found there was no recycling collection at all. “Residential recycling rates in the city are terrible,” she says.

But it’s not just city apartments that don’t get it right. In most multi-dwelling blocks, recycling is less convenient than in stand-alone dwellings. Without dedicated areas and separate chute systems, bins usually become a jumble of rubbish and recyclables.

In Oke’s building, recycling bins have been moved off each floor and she uses a special container, supplied by the council, to sort and transport her recyclables.

“It’s like a funky yellow shopping basket that’s easily tip-able. It fits neatly in my small kitchen,” she says. “If you move the recycle bins to reduce contamination, you have to make it easy to go to those locations.”

The best method will vary from building to building, depending on the space: the key is to make the chore as convenient as possible. Good signage, with colour coding and clear instructions can help focus the most absent-minded residents, so try asking your local council for education material.

Composting is always tricky in apartments, but to encourage residents, owners corporations can organise bulk purchase of worm farms or Bokashi Buckets, together with a workshop to get people started. In some buildings, enthusiastic residents have established communal composting on shared garden space.

Case study: Signature Apartments

At the suggestion of a resident, Signature Apartments turned to technology to create a sense of community. The building, in Redfern, Sydney, has created its own Facebook page.

Robert Goodall, an apartment owner and the chairperson of Signature’s management committee, is one of two people who moderate the page.

“There are 100 units in our building. A lot of us felt that within apartment buildings nobody ever knows their neighbours,” he says.

“We thought Facebook would be a way to get feedback on how the building was going. And for greening the apartments, we could post ideas and get comments. We were looking at installing a communal compost bin to reduce our waste and when posted that we got lots of positive responses.”

For now, about fifty people ‘like’ the page, and Goodall says many more visit it regularly. Among other things, residents have used it to borrow and lend things, and to recycle unwanted furniture.

He has also used Facebook to promote the building’s bike room. Low-impact transportation is one clear advantage apartment-dwellers have over suburban householders – they’re usually much closer to shops, workplaces and public transport. But when it comes to bike-friendly infrastructure, most buildings still don’t provide the goods.

A bike room had been planned for Signature Apartments, but when residents moved in, it hadn’t been fitted out. The committee conducted research on racks, layouts and costs.

“There are a lot of options out there. The internet is a good place to do a general browse and see what you can find,” Goodall says.

“Having the room is good because it takes the bikes out of all the common areas where people were locking them. And for riders, it gives us a safe place to store our bikes.”

This article was published by Sanctuary Magazine

Open publication – Free publishing – More common

Light pollution

In Greener Homes on June 4, 2011

Too much light is damaging to our nights

ON Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, when the sky is clear, Jack Mack lugs his telescope, computer, card tables and folders to the front of his Abbotsford home. He positions a sandwich board, which reads: “Welcome to Footpath Astronomy”.

He’s been doing this for four years, on Nicholson Road, next to the Retreat Hotel. “It gives people an opportunity to see the moon, a planet or a star cluster through a telescope,” he says.

Most city-dwellers notice the moon and nothing more. “People walk past and I say: ‘Sit down here and look in the eye piece’. And they’re absolutely blown away. Saturn is the crowd favourite, because you can easily see the gap between the planet and its rings.”

In 1610, when Galileo observed for the first time that the Milky Way was made up of individual stars, our galaxy was so bright it cast shadows on the ground. Now, from where we live, most Australians can’t see the Milky Way at all.

Mr Mack is a member of the Astronomical Society of Victoria, which has a dark sky viewing location near Heathcote in central Victoria. Even from there, the glow from the city encroaches upon the sky.

“It’s light pollution,” he says. “At least in the bush you can see the Milky Way with the naked eye. As you get closer to the city, the light gets denser and you see fewer and fewer objects.”

That’s not the only adverse effect of light pollution. Mark McDonnell, director of the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology, says it’s a threat to biodiversity and alters animal behaviour and feeding habits.

“Night-flying insects cannot resist the light. Research from Europe has shown a dramatic reduction in the number and diversity of insects, particularly moths, in cities when compared to the village-farmland edge. They estimate billions of insects are dying,” he says.

“It not only reduces food sources for animals, but also it reduces the number of pollinators. Light pollution also affects when plants flower and when they go dormant for the winter.”

The International Dark-Sky Association website carries useful guides on light pollution and residential lighting. Mr McDonnell believes householders can take a lead in reducing its harmful effects.

“We shouldn’t have lights that shine up. Some homes are lit up like landing fields around doors, paths and garages. We can shield lights so they’re only directed downwards. We can use motion detectors and timers to switch lights off when no one’s around.”

All our lighting also sucks energy. Last year, the Municipal Association of Victoria launched the Give our streets the green light campaign, aiming to secure state and federal funding towards the up-front cost of more efficient street lights.

It estimates that better globes and fittings would cut lighting energy use by over two-thirds and cause three to four times less light spillage.

Mr Mack, flanked by two freeways, the city and the MCG, says light pollution is bad and getting worse. Even so, he can still summon wonder among passers-by. On a good night for seeing, he shows the moon. “I do it from a low magnification first, then I put in a higher power and they’re looking inside a sea pockmarked with craters,” he says. “The moon is just as fascinating as anything in the solar system.”

Read this article at The Age online

Flying

In Greener Homes on May 29, 2011

Plane travel is the forgotten baggage on the green-home carousel

The carbon footprint of a return flight to London is about the same as the average household’s yearly carbon footprint, according to Moreland Energy Foundation.

When Helen O’Shea, from North Fitzroy, first heard about the greenhouse impact of flying, the information stopped her in her tracks. “Like many other people, I’d changed the light globes, got solar panels and reduced my driving,” she says. “But I realised you can’t take a holiday from that once a year and virtually double your carbon emissions.”

So, four years ago, Ms O’Shea decided not to fly.

She retired recently, after a career in academia in which she had worked around Australia and overseas. “I have friends on the other side of the world who I’d dearly love to see every year, but if I’m serious about adapting my lifestyle to the needs of society and the planet, then I think I can’t do that,” she says.

“Like every resolution, it stands to be broken, but I’ve set myself a goal – and it’s a journey in itself.”

As a part of its Zero Carbon Moreland project, Moreland Energy Foundation coordinates activities and retrofitting deals to help people go green. In the last few months, the campaign has focussed on transport, encouraging residents to take public transport, walk, ride and car-share.

Asha Bee-Abraham, from the foundation, says that if we’re serious about reducing our emissions, we must also think twice about long-haul travel.

“Flying does matter. It’s a difficult issue, because it’s become more and more accessible. And as we’ve globalised, our relationships have spanned the world.

“We’re not asking people to give up the air cold-turkey, but encouraging them to pause and think before they book a flight. Can you have a similar experience more locally, or travel by train or bus instead?”

In the office, she says, workers can try video conferencing instead of scheduling interstate or overseas meetings.

The foundation compared the greenhouse emissions of a journey between Melbourne and Sydney by plane, bus and car, with different passenger numbers. For just one person, driving came out worst, followed by plane and bus. But with a full car, driving was the most efficient.

Ms Bee-Abraham says that although offsetting your flights can be worthwhile, you must do your research. Costs and calculations vary widely, depending on the kind of offset and its assumptions about the aircraft’s load and efficiency, and the effect of emissions at high altitudes. The Carbon Offset Guide website recommends making sure the offsets are independently verified and comply with recognised standards.

(For an alternative take on offsets, visit Cheatneutral, a satirical website which allows cheating partners to balance their infidelity by sponsoring the celibate or monogamous.)

Throughout May, Ms Bee-Abraham is running a local adventures campaign. “Travelling broadens our perspectives, but there are ways we can travel that don’t involve flying. In Melbourne we’re surrounded by beautiful scenery and national parks, as well as places where people can pamper themselves and see things that are very different to our day-to-day lives,” she says.

Likewise, Ms O’Shea says her resolution hasn’t meant foregoing all fun. “If I want to visit friends or have a trip, I take the train and turn holidays into a time where the travel itself is a big part of the adventure.”

Read this article at The Age online

For extra inspiration, obey gravity with short story writer Laura Jean McKay. She’s blogging about a year without flying.